Free Ramdisk for Windows Vista, XP, 2000 and 2003 Server
Ramdisk or RAM-Disk is a virtual hard drive based on software abstraction that treats a segment of random access memory (RAM) as secondary storage which is similar to hard disks, except with advantage that ramdisk is a lot faster and access time is greatly improved. As there is no mechanical moving parts involved, there won’t be question of wear and tear too. Ramdisk has one obvious downside, that it’s volatile and not solid state. Contents in Ramdisk is stored in computer RAM, which will be lost when the power of computer is switched off.
With these benefits and limit, ramdisk can be used to store frequently accessed yet less important temporary data to speed up the system performance, such as swap space for virtual memory, temporary files used for programs such as Internet Explorer, BT client, P2P eMule, compression utility, translation software and etc, frequently accessed data from a database or used to hold uncompressed programs for short periods. From privacy point of view, Ramdisk is also a working drive for decrypted version of encrypted document, as all trace of the data will be wiped and deleted once power off.
There are plenty of Ramdisk driver and software available, such as RamDisk9xME, RAMDiskXP, RAMDiskSE and RAMDiskVE from Cenatek, RamDisk and RamDisk Plus from SuperSpeed, RAMDisk Enterprise Lite and Full version plus 64 MB limited free RAMDiskbased on Microsoft Ramdisk below from QSoft, and Ramdisk.sys driver for Windows 2000 from Microsoft published under KB257405. However, most of these Ramdisk drivers either is not free, or limit in its functionality especially on the size on RAM-disk. Some not even support Windows Vista.
The following freeware RRamdisk.sys, originally written by Gavotte based on Microsoft’s Ramdisk.sys, and later being added a GUI interface by lyh728 is not only free to use, it also stable, doesn’t have size limitation, supports popular FAT16，FAT32, NTFS filesystems, and supports Windows 2000 operating system and above including Vista.
Download Gavotte Ramdisk with GUI (ramdisk.zip).
Alternative download link.
To use Ramdisk, the most important requirement is that the system has a lot of memory, much a lot than the size of Ramdisk that you intends to create. It works on system with minimum 256 MB RAM, where you’re recommended not to set Ramdisk with size more than 64 MB.
Installation and setup of Ramdisk is pretty simple. Unpack the zip archive to a folder, and run ramdisk.exe. In Windows Vista, you need to right click on it and select “Run as Administrator”, if not you will get a Failed error message. Click on Install Ramdisk to install RRamdisk.sys driver. Answer Yes or Allow if prompted with driver not signed with valid digital signature or can’t verify the publisher of this driver software warning message. Once Ramdisk is installed, all buttons that previously grayed out inactive are now activated.
Now you can set the disk size in Bytes, configure the drive letter for the Ramdisk. You can also specify which media type is the drive – RAM Drive, Fixed Media or Removable Media (for simulating a floppy drive). The default choice, Fixed Media indicates that the Ramdisk is simulating a hard disk drive should work in most case. Click on OK when done with configuration. Note that if you modify the settings of the Ramdisk during the time when system process is accessing the Ramdisk, you will require to reboot the system. Caveat is that, if you put IE Temporary Internet files into the Ramdisk, you will always need to restart computer even though you’re not running IE.
A additional drive, the Ramdisk with default drive letter R: (assuming you’re not changing it) will be created, and immediately accessible for usage.
Other buttons in the Ramdisk GUI are pretty obvious in usage. Use “Remove Ramdisk” to uninstall Ramdisk, or more specifically RRamdisk.sys driver from the system. Save Image… and Load Image… allows users to save or open an image file for the whole contents of Ramdisk, useful if you want to store data in Ramdisk in unaltered state to be open up later.
Ramdisk.exe accepts a image file as its argument so that the image file can be loaded automatically into the Ramdisk from command line. Potential usage include adding of “ramdisk imgfilename” to system boot up script such as autoexec.bat to load the data into memory disk.
There are more customization and other potential usage for Gavotte Ramdisk not included in the GUI. However, you need to manually edit the registry. These additional functions are maintained by addswap.exe and rdutil.exe which explained pretty well by the Readme (included in Page 2). In most case, you won’t need to come to this extent.
Pages: 1 2
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Entries (RSS)
November 8th, 2009 02:01
Ying, I assume you are talking about the installer.
You should get file:
Gavotte_RAMDisk_1.0.4096.5_200811130.zip
In case of problems just google the file, it’s been posted on many Chinese forums.
November 7th, 2009 00:12
Kirk Enston
Where can I download latest code of this ramdisk? I can’t find it.
Thanks
November 3rd, 2009 19:38
[...] 1. Go and grab RAMdisk here. [...]
October 31st, 2009 07:07
The only documentation is here:
1) http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/05/27/free-ramdisk-for-windows-vista-xp-2000-and-2003-server/2/
2) Readme.txt for version dated 2008-Jan-01, because the latest version is messed up with some non European characters.
Here are the screenshots, just in case:
http://img682.imageshack.us/img682/2435/10302009190037.png
http://img340.imageshack.us/img340/278/10302009190114.png
Other than that, if you don’t speak Chinese you are out of luck (Gavotte is very popular on Chinese language forums).
It is a high quality RAM disk but getting any information beyond what’s available on this website is difficult.
October 30th, 2009 09:09
Just some verbose documentation on command line parameters and some examples would be good for this product. Where is it?
October 27th, 2009 16:30
I’m wondering how to check if your hardware is compatible with ramdisk installed using PAE before you actually try to install it. The last thing you want to do is to damage the BIOS.
October 27th, 2009 16:14
Starting with the version in the ZIP file dated 2008-01-01 Gavotte allows accessing all 4 GB of RAM on a system with 32 bit Windows XP or Vista with 4GB of RAM installed. Here is the reference at the bottom of “readme.txt”:
01.01.2008 support >=4G ram under 32bit windows (UsePAE=1)
It is not explained, however, how to enable this feature. Before you install the ramdisk you need to click on the following file included in the ZIP package:
ram4g.reg
This will add a parameter to Windows registry that tells the driver to use PAE to push the ramdisk into non-addressable RAM.
In short, 36 bit PAE extensions increase the available pool of memory. If you want to know more about it then you can easily spend all night on Google studying hundreds of pages devoted to the topic.
I had no problem to get Gavotte working on my 3 year old system (Windows XP SP3), and now have 2.7 – 2.9 GB of memory available, as seen on the screen that opens after you hit Ctrl+Shift+Esc:
http://img26.imageshack.us/img26/4240/10242009175818.png
Others might not be so lucky, it all depends on BIOS, mother board chipset and CPU.
October 26th, 2009 21:00
Starting with the version in the ZIP file dated 2008-01-01 Gavotte allows accessing all 4 GB of RAM on a system with 32 bit Windows XP or Vista with 4GB of RAM installed. Here is the reference at the bottom of “readme.txt”:
01.01.2008 support >=4G ram under 32bit windows (UsePAE=1)
It is not explained, however, how to enable this feature. Before you install the ramdisk you need to click on the following file included in the ZIP package:
ram4g.reg
This will add a parameter to Windows registry that tells the driver to use PAE to push the ramdisk into non-addressable RAM.
In short, 36 bit PAE extensions increase the available pool of memory in total. If you want to know more about it then you can easily spend all night on Google studying hundreds of pages devoted to the topic.
I had no problem to get Gavotte working on my 3 year old system (Windows XP SP3), and now have 2.7 – 2.9 GB of memory available, as seen on the screen that opens after you hit Ctrl+Shift+Esc:
http://img26.imageshack.us/img26/4240/10242009175818.png
Others might not be so lucky, it all depends on BIOS, mother board chipset and CPU.
October 8th, 2009 13:19
@”someone”
You’re an anal-retentive dickhead, don’t you have better things to do than pick apart the OP’s post? We all knew what he meant by “it’s volatile and not solid state.” You think we’re all idiots and don’t know that ram is “solid state”? Sure, he meant “flash memory”, we all knew that, too. And your comment about “swap space” is too eye-rolling to even comment on. Leave the poor cnut alone.
September 25th, 2009 16:19
[...] a RAMDisk. Google for them. The implementations are either free either cheap. For example this one. However there is some overhead implied but you can use it for other tasks as well. Also is very [...]
September 16th, 2009 14:26
@103
I think what he meant with “not solid state” is that data is not saved and “swap space” means a temporary folder for programs to work with.
August 21st, 2009 12:45
how does one automount the image at OS startup on Vista ?
August 13th, 2009 17:19
The Gavotte tool is awesome, works like a charm under Windows2000. Thanks
August 7th, 2009 01:27
Here is the original site of gavottes tool
http://www10.atwiki.jp/gavotterd/
Use Google-Translation tools to get it in a for you readable language.
August 6th, 2009 19:01
@all who asks for a reason why using RAMDisk (RD) for Virtual Memory (VM)
A RD is allways useful because it is faster then any other Memory. Some applications, mostly games, use VM ignoring that your system has quite enough memory. So a RD for VM is an optimal solution.
With the new version of Gavottes RD we can use the previously not usable RAM above 4GByte frontier by using PAE in 32Bit environment.
July 19th, 2009 19:58
This really needs an update on how the driver assigns the drive letter (or whatever the issue is with this), because every time another program or driver adds a drive letter (at least if it’s for a removable drive) the drive letter assigned by the RAMdisk just disappears, rendering the drive inaccessible and the data lost.
July 11th, 2009 20:24
Can any1 link me to a guide that teaches how to save the file inside ram disk into image file and how to load that image file when comp startup?
I knew it’s somehow related to the .bat files but….thats all i know =X”
check the readme.txt for how to invoke the command line.
July 10th, 2009 04:05
In Windows Vista you must right click and chose install as Administrator.
July 9th, 2009 11:20
@Someone
I think there are some program that needs to use swap space no matter what, even though the physical memory is sufficient. For whatever reason,i don’t know. go and google it…
Can any1 link me to a guide that teaches how to save the file inside ram disk into image file and how to load that image file when comp startup?
I knew it’s somehow related to the .bat files but….thats all i know =X
July 9th, 2009 02:53
This simply DOES NOT work under Windows Vista.
“Click on Install Ramdisk to install RRamdisk.sys driver.”
After pressing this, there just comes up the message “failed”, wíth no prompt to install the driver.
June 10th, 2009 04:30
Fails to install on Windows XP 64bit.
Error message is simply “Failed”.
Please can you raise this with the developer?
June 7th, 2009 19:47
[...] avete creato un ramdrive (consiglio Gavotte Ramdisk), potete spostare lì sopra i files temporanei. Nel caso abbiate poca RAM (es. 512 Mb), un RAMDRIVE [...]
June 4th, 2009 16:57
Goodness me, what a terrible article… I’ll assume the writer is not a native English speaker, so I won’t go into the poor grammar… However, some technical inaccuracies:
“Ramdisk has one obvious downside, that it’s volatile and not solid state.”
Since when was RAM not solid state? Which part of a RAM disk moves? RAM disks *are* solid state.
“ramdisk can be used to store … swap space for virtual memory, …”
???? Swap space is there to handle the situation where you’ve run out of physical memory – why on earth would you reduce your available physical memory in order to create swap space in, erm, physical memory??
Regards,
Someone off to read something else.
June 3rd, 2009 09:30
On My VISTA Laptop works fine, but I need to reload the RAMDRIVE in Windows 7 after every re-boot.
I always get the following error…
Windows can’t access this disk
The disc might be corrupt. Make sure the disc uses a format that Windows recognizes. If the disc is unformatted, you need to format before using it.
April 8th, 2009 10:33
[...] Solution [...]